tobacco talk: reflections on corporate power and the legal framing of consumption

Peter BensonDepartment of AnthropologyWashington University in St. Louis

Tobacco Talk:Reflections on Corporate Power and the Legal Framing of Consumption

This article examines how North Carolina tobacco farmers think about the moralambiguities of tobacco business. Drawing on ethnographic research with tobaccofarmers and archival research on the tobacco industry, I specify the core psycholog-ical defense mechanisms that tobacco companies have crafted for people associatedwith the industry. I also document local social, cultural, and economic factors inrural North Carolina that underpin ongoing rural dependence on tobacco despitethe negativity that surrounds tobacco and structural adjustments. This article con-tributes to our knowledge about tobacco farmers and tobacco farming communities,which is important for tobacco-control strategies. I reflect on ethical and economicparadoxes related to the rise of corporate social responsibility in the tobacco in-dustry, where an official legal framing of consumption, focused on informed adultconsumer autonomy and health education, is promoted to undermine more robustpublic health prevention efforts.

Keywords: [tobacco, smoking, agriculture, industry, public health]

Tobacco grower Frank Warren was skeptical of my motives for wanting tointerview him. Over the phone I introduced myself as an anthropologist interestedin the history and culture of tobacco in North Carolina.

“Too busy, find somebody else,” he replied and hung up the phone.Later I met Frank at a wintertime farm meeting. Another grower whom I already

knew introduced us. Doing his friend a favor, Frank agreed to talk with me for “fiveminutes only.”

Frank produces roughly 100 acres of tobacco, a medium size for the region, aswell as rotational fields in corn and soybeans. He lives in a modest house, wherehe was finishing his morning coffee when I arrived. We wound up talking for afull hour. He spoke about how neighboring farmers have gone out of businessand his contentions with reduced tobacco leaf prices and intensified competition.Owned and operated for decades by his parents and grandparents and the handfulof tenant families they employed, his family farm business is less stable than ever.Media accounts and tobacco growers tend to blame the public health tobaccocontrol movement for conditions of economic hardship and uncertainty. In fact,these conditions are the direct result of a market shift driven by the multinational

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MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Vol. 24, Issue 4, pp. 500–521, ISSN 0745-5194, online ISSN 1548-1387. C© 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rightsreserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1387.2010.01120.x

Reflections on Corporate Power and the Legal Framing of Consumption 501

tobacco industry’s investment in offshore production capacities since the 1970sand decision to maximize profits by purchasing more foreign leaf. As in otherindustries, tobacco companies benefit from lax environmental and labor laws inmany developed countries (National Institute for Tobacco-Free Kids 1999, 2001;WHO 2004).

Although negative reporting about the ethics of tobacco agriculture is rare in thelocal rag and other tobacco-state newspapers (Lima and Siegel 1999; Smith et al.2000), growers commonly feel that outsiders conspire to attack and undermine theirlife and work. In 1971, Frank’s local paper ran the following editorial, which failsto mention the threat that the globalization of leaf production and sourcing mighteventually pose to domestic grower interests.

[T]he mystery remains as to why the relentless attack on tobacco continues.There is insufficient evidence pertaining to the health aspects of bright leafand in view of the traumatic effect its extinction would have on the economynationally when that is in a pitiful condition is unbelievable. Tobacco hassuffered a crippling blow at the hands of those who would protect us fromourselves. [Graham 1971:15]

An unintended effect of public efforts to control tobacco use and the antitobaccomovement, which has intentionally demonized tobacco companies, has been thegrowth of a defensive posture among growers. “It’s not fair how tobacco farm-ers are portrayed in the media. We are not understood,” Frank tells me. “It allstarts with the word tobacco. There are negative connotations from the start.” Butthere is no evidence of a concerted attack on tobacco livelihoods waged by publichealth groups. It is a bit like the idea that Christianity is under attack in the UnitedStates, which rouses political and social defensiveness among adherents. Fantasti-cal scandals of ex-privilege, where victimhood is claimed by relatively advantagedconstituencies who now seem negatively marked by some difference or problem,incite sometimes dangerous responses and policy perspectives (Berlant 1997). It isthus important to complexly understand the cultural, industrial, and sociopoliti-cal bases of popular conservatism and backlash (Lipsitz 2006). Manifestations ofwhat the anthropologist Kathryn Dudley (2000) calls a “paranoid” political stylethat is common among U.S. farmers look different across regions, with particularcombinations of global and local contributions to feelings of threat.

By virtue of involvement in a problematized commodity chain, tobacco growersare forced to wrestle with society’s changing attitudes about tobacco in ways thatare often deeply personal and difficult. Studying tobacco agriculture using anthro-pological field methods of interviewing and direct observation requires sensitivityabout these issues (Benson and Thomas 2010). In 2004, I traveled south fromMassachusetts where I was a graduate student at the time to live in an old tenanthouse about an hour east of Raleigh in the country’s most active tobacco-producingregion. Apart from conducting roughly 200 interviews with growers, workers, andpublic health and labor advocates, I worked on a couple of farms and did all of themanual labor workers do. Beyond appearances (incl. skin color, gender, and otherforms of embodiment that allow me to socialize felicitously with tobacco grower

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families as if I were not completely suspect or strange), my rapport involved theopenness that defines ethnography.

“That five-minute rule was a bluff,” Frank admitted to me as our interviewwound down. “I was expecting a journalist. They just care about smoking. Theinterview begins: ‘Do you smoke?’ Question two is: ‘Do you want your kids tosmoke?’ When you say ‘nope’ each time, they get around to it: ‘Well, isn’t thathypocritical?’”

During interviews I often found myself wanting to interject my ideas about whatis disturbing about the tobacco industry and the contributions of industrial agricul-ture to significant public health problems. But I listened to growers and let themlead the way. I asked how they got into farming, how and why they have continued,and the major changes that farm families have faced, only to have them start talk-ing about the looming “health aspect,” a euphemistic phrase commonly employedto reference smoking risks. Textbooks on qualitative research methods extensivelydiscuss specific interview strategies. They devote less time to the dispositions andstyles that are just as important to developing effective and trusting relationshipswithin particular communities (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). In learning how to-bacco growers reason about the public health and the tobacco industry, I came tounderstand that this is not a simple story of good people doing a bad thing, as anoutsider might expect. It is about ethics in a complicated world and the power of aharmful industry to cultivate loyalty and fantasy at the grassroots.

Moral Experience and Critical Medical Anthropology

Almost all tobacco research is focused on consumption. In the United States,policymakers and health professionals have historically paid little attention to to-bacco growers and lacked cultural knowledge about their communities (Altmanet al. 1998:381). The “critical medical anthropology” perspective, focused on theindustry and the global free trade regime as the vectors of smoking disease, is a dom-inant paradigm in studies of many harmful commodities, including tobacco (Baeret al. 2004; Benson and Kirsch 2010; Nichter and Cartwright 1991; Singer andBaer 2008; Stebbins 2001). My goal has been to balance the critical considerationof industry power and government neglect with an apprehension for local experienceand the sociocultural context of tobacco dependency (Nichter 2003). The concept of“moral experience,” as developed by the anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, has beencentral to my approach. This concept refers to “what is locally at stake” for a givenpopulation. It refers to the local meaning of such values as “status, relationships,resources, ultimate meanings, [and] one’s being-in-the-world” and the experiencethat they are being threatened or transformed for one reason or another (Klein-man 1999:360–362). Moral experience refers not to a universal morality but to theimmense diversity of values across social locations. “From an ethnographic perspec-tive,” Kleinman writes, “what is at stake, what morally defines a local world, maybe, when viewed in comparative perspective, corrupt, grotesque, even downrightinhuman. That is to say, the moral may be unethical” (1999:365–366).

Despite impressive declines in smoking prevalence in Western countries, tobaccouse remains an unprecedented health crisis, the leading avoidable cause of death.“At no moment in human history,” writes Allan Brandt, a historian of medicine,


“has tobacco presented such a dire and imminent risk to human health as it doestoday” (2007:450). Whereas tobacco use caused about 100 million deaths in thelast century, it is estimated that as many as one billion people will prematurely diefrom tobacco in the current century (Proctor 2001; WHO 2008a). Against this un-precedented epidemiology, the question of whether it is ethical to cultivate tobaccofor profit seems appropriate. This article analyzes the justifications of growers. Myapproach is a method that is linked to case study analysis rather than an effort togeneralize. My argument is that when growers talk about the health aspect theyare neither using a primarily local discourse nor narrowly responding to publichealth politics. Why growers cling to and defend tobacco amid thin profits andthick clouds of ethical suspicion also reflects more than a strict financial calculus.Only by entering into “the ordinary, everyday space of moral processes in a localworld,” Kleinman (1999:413) writes, do we arrive at richly informed perspectiveson a phenomenon such as defensiveness. Societal and structural forces are also rele-vant in the study of any local world. “Moral experience,” Kleinman acknowledges,“possesses a genealogy as it does a locality” (1999:373).

Matthew Kohrman’s (2004, 2008) ethnography of Chinese physicians whosmoke offers striking similarities with my case study. These are people who strug-gle to come to grips with a coherent and decent subjectivity at the crossroads ofcompeting value systems and regimes that define what is normal and acceptable.What results, according to Kohrman, is a social and personal struggle to negotiatea “fraught identity.” The content of how these different groups reflect on their to-bacco dependencies and what is at stake differ completely. But in both cases thepublic health approach to tobacco is experienced in terms of a potential loss of na-tional belonging and the feeling that antitobacco regulatory impulses jeopardize notonly a livelihood, but also a sense of personal worth and a level of social standingthat is deserved because one feels responsible, professional, and acceptable. “Theperception is that just because you grow tobacco you are prosmoking,” Frank tellsme, insisting on his own normalcy and mainstream morality. “That’s not how itworks. You can grow tobacco and be sensible about smoking.” When growers talkabout tobacco, they are also talking about other values and relationships that are atstake for them. This article is about the active construction of morality in a historicalcontext and influenced by industry, which ends up looking a lot like a dominantmodel of consumerism and agency in the United States at large.

Pride in Tobacco

There is remarkable commonality in how individual growers talk and think aboutsmoking. A stock script involving several patterned lines of defense exists. Only ahandful of the growers I met vehemently deny that smoking is harmful. This is farmore common among older growers and retirees. For many in this aging cohort,tobacco is only one area where the government has overreached and where thescience is manipulated by urbanite liberal elites, alongside climate change, evolution,and multiculturalism. This view represents a mix of libertarian values, the hyperbolefueled by conservative talk radio, and the idea, which goes back to at least theReconstruction, that the South is under attack. “I tell you,” a grower told his localnewspaper in 1990, “I’ve got about as much use for the Surgeon General as I’ve got


for flying a kite. People pay no attention to that man in North Carolina” (Bivens1990:1).

The denials of the most stubborn growers echo the refutation of science that waspart of the tobacco industry’s strategic response in the postwar decades (Brandt2007; Benson and Kirsch 2010). Antigovernment themes and aloofness about riskwere promulgated in tobacco marketing, memorably in the Marlboro Man cam-paign that began in the 1960s and helped define dominant social meanings ofdependence and risk for generations (Brandt 2007:261–264). There are a coupleof notable ironies about the adoption of antigovernment attitudes by some tobaccogrowers. This group has been the historical beneficiary of a generous system of pricesupports and economic protections legislated in the New Deal. And the expressionof distaste for company buyers (as opposed to government officials) was a commonfeature of the public leaf auctions that were a core part of that program. I makesense of these ironies by looking at the allegories of citizenship embedded in localtobacco talk and promulgated in relationships between growers and the industry.

My fieldwork was conducted nearby the Tobacco Farm Life Museum, establishedby the R. J. Reynolds Corporation in the 1980s to sculpt a positive view of tobaccoas a heritage. Motorists who stop there learn interesting facts about old-fashionedproduction techniques of the Depression-era tenant world now swept away bytechnological change. They browse handicrafts, lots of wooden farm equipment,and black-and-white photographs. For the tobacco industry this kind of culturalinvestment was strategic. The museum makes the framing of tobacco agriculture asan innocent pastime available to motorists and local growers actively involved in thebusiness alike. In favor of a wholly positive rather than complexly realistic view oftobacco, the museum does not mention the health risks associated with tobacco use.The public education that it provides refuses a conversation about where tobaccoagriculture can legitimately and feasibly go given the harmfulness of the plant.

The “Pride in Tobacco” campaign was launched in the late 1970s by R. J.Reynolds Corporation (R. J. Reynolds 1978a, 1982; White 1988:46–48). Internalcompany documents make clear that the purpose of the campaign was to use apositive image of tobacco to counter antitobacco efforts, especially in tobacco-producing states. The explicit goal was to generate “wider and more favorablecoverage than the tobacco industry has enjoyed in many years” (R. J. Reynolds1978a:2–8). Along with the characteristic “Pride in Tobacco” bumper stickers,placards, and billboards, the campaign involved press conferences and rallies inmajor tobacco markets. In 1978 alone, the campaign’s first year, there were over1,300 stories referencing the campaign in about 700 newspapers. Internal documentsfrom Reynolds reveal that the campaign’s audience was imagined as “industryelements.” Although the images and media coverage were public, the aim was toreach an internal constituency of people involved in the tobacco business, althoughnot formally embedded as company men. This group included “manufacturers,farmers, warehousemen, wholesalers, retailers and their suppliers.” The goal wasto encourage “people whose way of life depends on this important commodity,” aplanning memo states, to see themselves as having a great deal at stake in politicalallegiance to tobacco companies (R. J. Reynolds 1978b). The company seems tohave been aware that growers and these other groups were perhaps feeling thenegative pressure of antitobacco politics and, with something important at stake in


tobacco policy, were perhaps ideally positioned to influence it. By “demonstratingthe economic importance of tobacco,” an internal memo states, the company wouldbecome “the primary friend of the grower” among manufacturers, and growerscould become a key constituency “to influence legislative and regulatory bodies”(R. J. Reynolds 1982:1).

At the same time, internal documents show that Reynolds was clearly awareof the contradictions and problems facing growers, including the company’s ownshift to purchase more foreign leaf. In one document from 1977, entitled “TobaccoGrower Relations,” the company’s director of corporate public affairs documentsthe potential for friction due to “the market price of leaf tobacco” and increases inimported tobacco, as well as a history of grower suspicions about the motives andinterests of buying companies. The memo cites the need to confront these potentialtensions between Reynolds and tobacco growers by emphasizing through publicrelations a need for “complete industry unity” in the face of the “health scare.”The memo recommends the formation of a tobacco-growers information commit-tee within Reynolds in order to “improve” relations with growers and “provide theCompany and the Industry with a legislative defense mechanism” (cited in Joneset al. 2008). The committee was one part of the rural public relations campaign,which was thus conceived, a memo from 1978 states, as an “industry-wide cam-paign to create support for the nation’s oldest agricultural livelihood,” stressing “theeconomic importance of the crop to everyone associated with tobacco” and seeking“to unite these interests into a cohesive force that will help ensure all viewpoints re-ceive a fair hearing when the industry and its people are threatened by anti-tobaccoactivists” (R. J. Reynolds 1978b:11). The company distributed information kits andbrochures describing the economic contribution of tobacco agriculture to rural com-munities. There was data on the tax contribution of tobacco products. Brochuresincluded “suggestions on how tobacco people can combat anti-tobacco groups.”One of the most effective ways, the brochures noted, was to tell antitobacco peo-ple about the economic and cultural value of tobacco agriculture (R. J. Reynolds1978a:8). Even though tobacco agriculture has indeed embedded distinctive culturalvalues in producer regions and has been of great economic importance, it is vital toemphasize here that these facts were being politicized in subtle ways and the publichealth was portrayed as the main threat to these realities. Growers were coachedto get preachy, thereby contributing free public relations labor for the companyrelocating their livelihoods offshore. The logo proclaiming “pride in tobacco” fea-tured a hand clenching tobacco leaves and giving a thumbs up. Growers hung signson farm trucks and in farm shops. The company placed 180 billboards with thecampaign logo along North Carolina highways (R. J. Reynolds 1978a:8).

The campaign also involved the “Tobacco Center Concept.” R. J. Reynolds iden-tified eight tobacco towns and focused promotions there, with the goal of “[h]eavyemphasis” on “‘Pride’ visibility in local tobacco markets.” This concept took ad-vantage of the presence of influential growers, extension workers, and agriculturallenders and suppliers in key towns. Local committees of farmers and business peoplewere established by Reynolds to administer company-sponsored community eventslike auction-hollering contests, essay-writing contests in public schools, tobaccofestivals, animal and farm shows, local beauty contests, community barbecues, andhistorical reenactment activities (R. J. Reynolds 1982:2–10). At free meals corporate


reps made speeches that depicted the industry as a unified “tobacco family” (White1988).

The campaign was an effective way to connect with growers. It organized growersinto what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983), afictive kinship among people who have no direct relationship but feel like a family. Itwas a vehicle for smuggling in a politics of public health and industry loyalty. Use ofthe word tobacco played a key role. The campaign did not advocate pride in cigarettemanufacturing. The logo’s nondescript leaf clenched by a hand has farmers holdingon for dear life, but, most importantly, clinging to something that is agricultural innature, not industrial. The clenched hand is holding something good, a tradition,not a deadly product. Imagine a “Pride in Cigarettes” bumper sticker instead. Thecampaign created a constituency that was comfortable possessing a respectable andvaluable heritage but responded to negative news reports about smoking and healthas a personal attack. This kind of fear-based public relations converged at a moregeneral level with the conservative politics of the day. Ironical dependence amonggrowers was reconciled through reference to tobacco people as part of a family that isat once threatened by the state and yet of great value to the nation. Although tobaccohas long provided an important source of livelihood—in the 1960s, there were nearlyhalf a million tobacco farm families spread across more than a dozen states—thisjustification of the industry was strategically misleading. The appeal on behalf ofgrowers ignored the mass exodus of farm owners and operators from tobaccoagriculture in the 1980s and 1990s because of economic hardships associated withthe globalization of tobacco production, which undermined the small family farmunits promoted as the rationale for protecting the tobacco industry (Benson in press).

Tobacco growers frequently refer to the historical depth of tobacco agriculture.Tobacco is “not all negative,” they say. “Tobacco has done a tremendous amountfor this country,” a grower who does not smoke tells me. “There is no house inNorth Carolina that does not have some tobacco money in it.” When growers referto tobacco’s history it is predictably favorable. This romanticized past lacks theviolence and exploitation of slavery and the culture of sharecropping. Heritage hassubjective meaning for many growers and casts tobacco as positive and productive,although growers also wear the minor capitalist hat and are at the same time realistic.“Yes, there is a heritage, but at this point this is a business just like any other,” Franktold me. “It is about a profit and if there is not profit in it, then we’re not going todo it.”

Tobacco, Morality, and the Cultural Geography of the Drug Trade

Most growers reject denial and stubbornness as remnants of a bygone era. “Theolder generation is out of touch,” a grower in his fifties tells me. Acknowledgmentof the value of tobacco control is not uncommon in the tobacco grower population(Wilson et al. 2004). The grower population has itself become more homogenous,increased international competition in the past few decades bringing about landconsolidation and farm industrialization. Growers are a shrinking class of smallbusiness owners who at this point are almost exclusively white, derive middle-classincomes, employ seasonal migrant workers, and avoid the negative implication offrugality pegged on the use of family labor. They tend to have hundreds of thousands


of dollars in capital investments, belong to usually dual-income families, regularlyattend church, and, ideally, have a brick two-story house. Postwar government ru-ral modernization programs helped subsidize the mechanization of tobacco farmsthrough loans and educational resources. The reclassification of tobacco growersas minor capitalists, “small businessmen,” in the words of a 1961 article from theWilson Daily Times (1961:17), paralleled the suburbanization of growers as belong-ing not just to an imagined vocational community but a much wider imagined main-stream. Meanwhile, an emphasis on higher education, formal agronomic training,and managerialism in the grower ranks added to a long-standing idea that tobaccogrowers are fundamentally different kinds of people from the racial minorities theyemploy and often stigmatize as aggrieved, lazy, worthless, illegitimate, or illegal(Benson in press; Kingsolver 2007).

Cynthia Kettle, an art teacher and the wife of a tobacco grower, affirms thesmoke-free campus policy at the public high school where she works. But she feltchided by a school assembly focused on informing students about drug abuse, whichlumped tobacco with illicit drugs.

I know smoking is bad for you and I don’t smoke. Our livelihood dependson people smoking. That is a fact. It’s not something that I lose sleep over.This is a legal product. It is for adults. I do have a problem with how thecompanies advertise to children. But I felt like the school, telling people notto smoke, attacked my family. That is my husband’s job. Our kids learn thattobacco is in the same class as cocaine. They come home and wonder what iswrong with our family. We explain the history. We tell them about how wegrew up on tobacco farms, that tobacco is part of our heritage, and thatpeople have lost respect for it. We also talk about health and making smartdecisions. I hope they will not smoke when they are adults. I reallydiscourage it. But I’ve got to say that it’s ultimately their choice. There are alot of things that are dangerous and what I can do as a parent is provide mychildren with information and skills so they can make good decisions.

Cynthia claims a social identity that frames citizenship in terms of what one doesin the family more than in the civil society or in relationships throughout the widersociety and economy. The dominant theme of parenthood helps cast an industrialtobacco business as something that seems simply to put food on the table, pay thebills, and maintain a family rather than a means of making profit or procuring classstanding and social location. Tobacco farming is her “husband’s job,” but also “ourbusiness,” suggesting its primacy in the household economy, in spite of the fact thather salary as a school teacher has in various years comprised a majority of theirincome. Nor does she claim that education or mentoring is her heritage, even thoughher two sisters are also school teachers, like their parents. Cynthia basically saysthat this is not a crop that they just started to grow to make money, there is a back-story here, and tobacco consumption is lawful. In some sense, she is arguing foran understanding of tobacco as an “embedded” commodity culture (Polanyi 1957).This is also a claim about not having chosen to do anything wrong and about livinglife as an unmarked citizen, normal in other words, lacking some negative distinctionthat would reduce the self to a delegitimized category. “My husband and I like to


go out to eat on the weekends,” Cynthia says later in the interview. “Sometimeswe drive into Raleigh, only an hour. We might catch a show or a movie. We don’tlike to be around smoking. So we’re just like everyone else in that regard. We sit inthe nonsmoking section.” This model of normalcy hinges on Cynthia seeing herselfand her family as having more in common with suburbanites in Raleigh than with,say, the Latin American migrant workers who live for the harvest season nearby ina cluster of mobile homes. Defending tobacco as a means of seeming normal andidentifying with the exit culture of suburban sprawl is sometimes the flipside ofsubtly taking distance from scenes of the abnormal and the classless. In the socialtext of local moral defenses for tobacco, scenes of optimal parenthood and a tacitlywhite heritage trace a faint racial divide, the self-making and the distance taking,which plays out through intertextual references to geography, blameworthiness, andlegality in the many lines of defense and becomes vivid when tobacco is contrastedwith illicit drugs.

In the 1980s, tobacco-control advocates and fiscal conservatives sought to endthe New Deal program. They wanted the government to cease supporting tobaccoagriculture. “Let the tobacco farmer stand on his own two feet,” said a fiscal con-servative in the Congress, “as we are asking the welfare recipients and the poor andthe needy and the minorities and all others in America” (White 1988:57). By takingaway government assistance to tobacco-dependent communities, this reform wouldhave caused rapid farm consolidation, putting, at that time, tens of thousands ofgrowers out of business. Tobacco industry public relations and tobacco state politi-cians espoused the virtues of farm families, portraying tobacco growers as peoplewith a respectable heritage, honest hard workers, and sensible about the scienceof smoking risk, thereby deserving special government entitlement (see Benson inpress). Senator Charlie Rose, a Democrat from North Carolina, became well knownfor his seemingly apolitical language about good parenting. “I don’t smoke,” Roserepeated in his communications with the regional and national media. “I don’t wantanyone in my family to smoke. It will kill you” (White 1988:58).

Stereotypes of the “undeserving poor” as a threat to the national future andthe national product were used (and are still used) to legitimize a harsh socialpolicy agenda (Katz 1990). A focus on the family in the positive political rhetoricabout tobacco grower interests distanced growers from welfare recipients but alsofrom the looming image of Big Tobacco, construing them as responsible parentsand presumably deserving government support and public approval, or at leastacceptance. In the end, the New Deal program endured for another two decades. Asthe domestic tobacco agriculture sector fell into sharp decline in the 1990s, tobaccogrowers received billions of dollars in special farm relief, legislated by the Congressand funded by taxpayers, while other affected groups, such as tobacco workers,received no funds (Womach 2004).

Emphasis on the health of children and family also obviates the population healthperspective. In a class action suit in the 1990s, a lawyer for the tobacco companyBrown and Williamson asked the company’s executive in charge of youth smokingprevention initiatives, “Why do you care why kids smoke?”

“I’m a mother,” the executive replied while under oath. “I have two small chil-dren, two girls, eight and six. I don’t want my children to smoke. I don’t wantanybody’s kids to smoke. So it’s very important to me” (Wakefield et al. 2006).


A vilified industry is humanized in terms of responsible parenting. These arenormal people who do what seems natural in the family domain. “Tobacco supportsmy family and pays the bills,” growers commonly say. “That makes me a goodperson, not a bad person. I provide for my family. I don’t smoke and I don’t letmy children smoke.” Tobacco growers frequently insist that they produce a legalcrop and distinguish themselves from criminal elements. “I’m not a drug dealer,”a grower told me in an interview after I asked him to comment on perceptions oftobacco growers in the society. “Tobacco is legal. It’s a real livelihood. I’m not outhere peddling drugs. Go into town, that’s where the problem is, not out here.” Herethe defense of livelihood legitimacy also differentiates classes and cultures. Spatialmetaphors reflect a tacit divide between urban and nonurban, while reference tothe formality of the tobacco economy helps map moral meanings of worthiness andillegitimacy down geographical and legal lines.

In sum, defenses of tobacco have for a long time sought to renormalize thetobacco business through an appeal to a wider repertoire of cultural images. Thesedefensive strategies trickled down from corporate headquarters through variousmedia to become the common language among tobacco growers who were alsobeing coached to feel threatened. When I hear references to heritage, family values,or legality, I try to ascertain the moral importance of these values for growers whilealso keeping in mind the industry’s role in crafting key rationalizations and tropesfor its dependent constituencies. The importance of taking distance from criminalityfor tobacco growers may primarily be about defending a livelihood amid limitedother options. It also has to do with the expedient if also subtle contrast with thestereotype of the undeserving poor and the advancement of a more general claimabout the geography and culture of normalized social belonging.

Divided Loyalties

Growers who have considered diversification away from tobacco have almost alwaysdone so for economic reasons rather than moral ones (Altman et al. 1998, 2000).Some do admit to feeling moral ambivalence about their crop. “Growing tobaccois a subconscious problem for me,” a nonsmoking grower tells me in an interview.

Tobacco pays my bills but it kills people. I want to be a good person. It isbad for smokers, but it is good for me and mine. I don’t know. Being aChristian, I want to be a righteous person in whatever way. But I growtobacco. Does that make me un-Christian? Would Jesus grow tobacco?Would he vilify me for growing tobacco? I know, I know, it’s a legal productand an individual choice. That’s basically my position. If you smoke, sipliquor, it’s up to you. But it still nags at me. I can’t quit tobacco because I’vegot a family, and at my age.

This kind of moral reflection is most evident in the story of Ricky Flint, the onegrower I met who diversified away from tobacco primarily for moral reasons. Until1992, tobacco was the main cash crop of Ricky and his father. When the old manretired Ricky decided to transition. “All of a sudden I was not just a farmer,” hetells me.


When I was farming with my dad, I was a farmer. Now I was in charge andthat meant I was a tobacco farmer. I was never comfortable with that label. Ialways grew other crops and worked more with the corn and beans. I alwaysloved farming, just not tobacco. There was always something about the labelthat bothered me. I always had this deep nagging that it is sinful.

Ricky switched to peanuts and produce. Many growers who know Ricky or knowof him question the idea that his decision was made on moral grounds. It seemsto make perfect economic sense. He was well positioned to transition. Becausehis father was frugal, never expanding through debt financing, Ricky would haveneeded to invest in specialized tobacco equipment to remain profitable. He optedto use resources provided through small state grants to switch. Ricky emphasizesthe moral component, however. He apparently began to consider exiting tobaccoproduction in the mid-1980s, with mounting evidence of a link between secondhandsmoke and disease (see Brandt 2007:279–318). This bothered Ricky because itcontradicted the industry’s talk of consensual adult consumption. “Back in the1970s it wasn’t a big deal for me,” he says. “Some people smoked, some peopledidn’t. But now there was proof that tobacco hurts people who don’t have a choiceor choose not to smoke. As a farmer, I could no longer just say, ‘It’s up to thesmoker.’ I felt it was up to me now.”

All tobacco farmers are exposed to antismoking messaging. In Ricky’s case itmade a dent. But he carefully negotiates this decision’s unpopularity. His moralstance toward tobacco is dynamic, seems to arise in the narration itself, and involvesmultiple registers of engagement with questions about what is right and wrong.Sitting in his kitchen sipping coffee, he continues.

It was unheard of to not have tobacco on a farm. This is North Carolina!Everyone knows our crop kills people. But people don’t talk about it aroundhere. When I stopped growing people were shocked. Other farmers seemedirritated. They asked, “What the hell are you going to grow?” Some rolledtheir eyes. They knew my father and I were good tobacco farmers, and theyknew I could have stayed in the business. I tell everyone that it was apersonal decision, not for everybody. I do think questions about morality arefair game for tobacco farmers. But I don’t think there is one single answer.

Although legislatures are beginning to pass tobacco control reforms in stateswhere tobacco is grown, there has historically been much less support for tobaccocontrol and fewer negative attitudes about tobacco there, including lower cigarettetaxes, fewer clean air ordinances, and considerable support for the idea that it is notmorally wrong to profit from tobacco business (Altman et al. 1997, 2000; Fishman1998; Sullivan et al. 2009). Consequently, tobacco states have comparatively higheradult and adolescent smoking rates. Industry advertising exceeds $2 billion annuallyin the major tobacco states, 20 percent of its nationwide advertising (NationalInstitute for Tobacco-Free Kids 2005a).

In my fieldwork I heard stories about rural pastors of small churches who decadesago advocated against tobacco, instructing parishioners to plant other crops or findother work and landowners to sell tobacco land. This religious critique goes as


far back as the first commercial tobacco plantings in North America. Today someProtestant congregations continue to discourage relationships to tobacco. These arenot the churches growers attend. The Protestant denominations that growers attendsometimes discourage smoking but never challenge the morality of tobacco busi-ness. Churches in tobacco states have tended to avoid stigmatizing leaf cultivationand instead emphasize the importance of the work ethic reflected in successful farmmanagement and the idea that parenthood is the proper arena for normalizing cer-tain kinds of ethical or healthful behaviors in adolescents. Congregations have beenless likely than other community organizations (e.g., farm groups, the ExtensionService) to conduct activities aimed at helping growers cope with economic declineor think about diversification (Altman et al. 1998, 2000).

“I don’t get a good response from other farmers,” Ricky says. “They are notgoing to agree with my decision. They have their whole life invested in something.They don’t want to hear that it’s bad. They are more or less obligated to finish thiscourse. I’ll admit, for me it was easier. We had old equipment. It was in bad needof replacing. Other growers expanded to keep up with the tobacco business but Ididn’t want to.”

At a foundational level Ricky does not challenge the legitimacy of tobacco busi-ness. “I want to make it clear,” Ricky continues. “I am not judging or condemningany other farmers. I am not saying it is the only way or the best way. It was the deci-sion that made sense for me. I tell other farmers that. But they know that part of mydecision was about me not feeling good about the health aspect. So there is alwaysgoing to be awkwardness. They assume I’m also judging them. At farm meetingswe’ll say hello to each other. But they’ll always ask, ‘How’s the peanuts business?’”

This story is told to me in a tone that seeks to convince as much as narrate andpersonalize a decision that might imply a broader principle. Ricky places himselfwithin the first person plural to index the normalcy of his fraught position. “Wealways knew that what we were growing wasn’t good for you,” he tells me. “Butwe didn’t think it was bad to grow it. A lot of us don’t smoke because it’s notgood for your health. We never thought that if you grow it then you are a badperson. But then there was so much criticism. You know you are a good person,but everyone is saying you’re not, and so you start to question yourself.” Theshift to the second person comes when Ricky speaks specifically about his personalexperience, and this shift highlights what is so negotiated about his moral stanceas it reposes personal feelings as colloquial and situational experience. To stay trueto the religious dimension of his decision without implying its universality, Rickydiscusses religious faith in largely Pauline terms, although with a curious twist oflegalism. What was “sinful” was not the act of tobacco farming itself but a felt lackof alignment between inside and outside, or, in Paul’s language, faith and works.“There’s plenty of moral, Christian people growing tobacco,” Ricky tells me.

Sin is a complicated thing. It’s got to be how you define it in each case.That’s what Paul talks about. If you’re a tobacco farmer and you say,“I don’t see a problem with this. People have a choice whether they smokeor not. I’m not holding a gun on them to buy these cigarettes,” and that’s theway you really believe, then I think you’re fine. What is important is that youdon’t believe one thing and do another. I felt I needed to do something else.


What seems evident in theory is much more complicated in practice. I suggest toRicky that this idea might imply that anything goes. His response is telling. He seesthe national law as a firm threshold, not allowing leeway in the case of an illicitsubstance, for example. “Illegal drugs, well that’s always going to be wrong,” hesays, “There you are breaking the law.”

The Legal Framing of Consumption

Although continuing to use its political influence to oppose the global expansionof tobacco control, in the United States the tobacco industry now engages withpublic health critique and policy via a different set of strategies. Leading the wayis Philip Morris USA, the most powerful tobacco company. It adopted a corporatesocial responsibility platform in the last decade, a broad public relations campaignaimed at publicizing information about smoking risks and the company’s putativetrustworthiness. Philip Morris has also aligned itself with the leading public healthgroups in supporting sweeping tobacco control measures, namely, new legislationgranting the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco products.The public health community battled the industry for decades to pass such a bill.This became possible in 2000, when Philip Morris ended its opposition to the mea-sure. Rather than fighting enhanced government regulation, company managementdecided its financial and legal interests were best served by participating in its de-velopment. Philip Morris played an active role in crafting the public debate and thelegislation’s language up through its final passage in June 2009 (Benson 2010b).

The bill authorized new, larger pack warning labels and allows the FDA torestrict advertising and promotions that appeal to children and requires the pub-lication of an annual list indicating harmful constituents in each brand. However,certain segments of the public health raised critical questions, emphasizing the vivideconomic interests behind Philip Morris’s support and the bill’s capacity to limitthe industry’s liability and strengthen its financial solvency. As I’ve examined theseeconomic and ethical paradoxes in more detail elsewhere (Benson 2008b, 2010b),my focus here is on the model of the consumer that is at the basis of this unlikelypolitical alliance between public health and huge tobacco.

The National Institute for Tobacco-Free Kids (2005b), a leading antitobaccoadvocacy group and the bill’s most vocal proponent, emphasizes at the front of afact sheet about the legislation:

Adults are free to choose to use tobacco, which, despite the health risksinvolved, remains a legal product for adults to purchase and use. The FDAbill will enhance adult choice by providing consumers with the informationthey currently do not have access to on what is in the tobacco products theyuse and the health risks associated with any of the ingredients in the productor the chemicals contained in tobacco smoke. As a result, adult choice is aninformed choice.

This emphasis on informed adult decisions in the official public health approachhelps us make sense of why willed commodity fetishism, flattening what is uniqueabout tobacco in comparison with other products, interestingly has great value in


rural North Carolina. Here is an excerpt from one of my interviews with an activegrower in 2006.

There are a lot of things that are bad for you. If you eat a hamburger andfries everyday you are going to get fat. Drinking and driving is irresponsible.It is the same with guns. Lots of people don’t know how to use guns andaccidents happen, or guns fall into the hands of criminals. It’s the same withsmoking. I grow tobacco. Consumers need to know the risks and makeresponsible decisions. But ultimately it is their choice to consume a legalproduct. If they are okay with the risk, then that is their choice.

In a lawsuit in 2001 tobacco industry defense attorneys argued to the jury that in“our society there are lots of risky products that are not defective. Guns can shootyou, knives can cut you, and we all unfortunately know what eating too muchfatty food can do to you” (Cummings et al. 2006:85). The tobacco industry’s goalin using this language is to portray whatever injuries or harms might derive fromconsumption as the result of human user error, not industrial design or productdefectiveness ( Lochlann Jain 2004). Reference to other commodities is a means ofmisleadingly casting tobacco as an ordinary consumer product, neglecting that it,unlike other legal products, is intrinsically harmful when used as intended, and sug-gesting that risks related to tobacco use are equivalent to other kinds of risk. Thesecomparisons understate tobacco’s specific public health toll. But they do not paircigarettes with just anything. There is no comparison to baseballs or automobileseven though these products entail risks. It matters that the comparisons pit tobaccoalongside firearms and alcohol (legal products also regulated by minimum age re-quirements) and foods (also regulated by FDA). Thus, the comparisons refer to asubset of products where risk and harm are the subject of public debate, perhaps alsospecial regulatory frameworks, and where optimal consumer behavior is framed interms of moderation and appropriate kinds and levels of use. A model consumeris constructed against a latent image of abusive, excessive, and irresponsible con-sumption. As in the Paulian model of sin, normal consumption seems to be a matterof alignment between what is external to the subject (in this case, warning labels,health discourse) and the subjectivity of being responsible for the consequences ofuse. In this logic, the harmful outcomes of consumption, whether smoking disease,injuries or fatalities related to gun use, or obesity, are pinned on the individual users,and the abuse of products is narrowly understood in terms of an individual lack ofcontrol, inherent blameworthiness, or malice rather than issues of access, the socialdeterminants of health behavior, industrial predation, or product design.

The sheer magnitude of health epidemics related to legal forms of consumptionis a testament against the efficacy of existing regulatory approaches that emphasizeindividual agency, access to information, and decision science (Guthman 2007). Yet,various industries have now voluntarily enhanced product labels, from warning la-bels about beverage temperature at your coffee shop to nutrition data included onStyrofoam packaging at fast food chains. These initiatives are legal liability strategiesthat make individualized health promotion a public health approach sponsored bycorporations, perhaps to avoid more robust preventive measures. The CongressionalBudget Office estimates that the FDA legislation for tobacco products will reduce


youth smoking by 11 percent over the next decade and adult smoking by 2 percent.However, the legislation has nothing to do with proven tobacco control methodssuch as taxation and smoke-free legislation, and it may even deflect governmentattention and resources from these methods. Philip Morris vigorously opposes taxa-tion and smoke-free legislation as public health approaches. But since the 1990s thecompany has invested $1 billion in an internal Youth Smoking Prevention depart-ment, which creates communications and resources aimed at encouraging parentsto “talk to their kids about not using tobacco products,” as the company’s websitestates. The department provides educational facilities and youth organizations withgrants to support the development of “healthy lifestyles” and funds programs toinform tobacco product retailers about smoking laws (Philip Morris USA 2010).

Internal company documents reveal that corporate officials have long believedthat support for the regulation of youth smoking is an especially effective wayof demonstrating that the company “is acting reasonably and responsibly,” whileshaping the public debate to focus on parents and kids rather than corporations(McDaniel et al. 2006:217). One Philip Morris document from the early 1990s hascorporate officials strategizing about how to tilt the balance of “youth smokingversus prohibition” trends in public health (McDaniel et al. 2006). The smokingproblem was fashioned as a problem of law enforcement related to age limits andyouth access. The narrowing of tobacco governance to focus on adult choice, lawenforcement, and family matters is a choreographed effect of what appear sim-ply to be concrete investments in public health by a responsible corporate citizen.The $100 million television campaign, called “Think. Don’t smoke,” launched bythe Youth Smoking Prevention department, is the largest antitobacco campaignever undertaken by the tobacco industry. Public health officials insist that effectiveyouth smoking prevention programs must include comprehensive information aboutsmoking disease and the nature of addiction. Philip Morris’s television spots steerclear of these issues and favor images of parent and child interlocution. Sociologicalstudies of how viewers respond arrive at the same conclusion: regular viewers ofthis campaign believe that tobacco companies are “more responsible” socially andnot culpable for smoking harms (Szczypka et al. 2007).

Conclusions

The dependence of tobacco growers on a harmful plant and an uncertain economyhas been maintained through a combination of industry strategies and the variousinfluences that render tobacco livelihoods legitimate and moral on multiple levels.In this conclusion I argue for the importance of anthropological research on to-bacco agriculture for a comprehensive tobacco control perspective that attends toproduction and supply issues as much as smoking behavior.

Public health advocates began publicly to express sympathy with the hardshipsof tobacco farmers in the 1990s. They sought to remake tobacco growers into theallies of public health, emphasizing, in a publication with rather limited circula-tion or uptake in the grower community (National Institute for Tobacco-Free Kids1999), the industry’s false claim to be the friend of the growers and the detrimentalimpacts of multinational capital in states like North Carolina. These efforts led toan unprecedented collaboration between public health groups and tobacco-grower


leadership, two groups that came together to produce a major policy report com-missioned by President Clinton. The report insisted that the seemingly opposinggoals of tobacco control and tobacco farm sustainability were “unavoidably linkedand would mutually benefit” from comprehensive reforms (President’s Commission2001). The plan was to use taxes on tobacco products to shift the cost of supportingand stabilizing tobacco farm businesses onto smokers and fund crop diversificationprograms and other forms of economic development in communities that have beendependent on tobacco. In addition, to further support prices, contain productionlevels, and subvert the industry’s interest in purchasing cheap leaf, the geography oftobacco farming in the United States was to be frozen, with active producers needinggovernment-approved licenses stipulating maximum annual production levels. Thisplan would have also mandated that the tobacco industry fund over $28 billion foreconomic development, agricultural diversification, and market stabilization pro-grams in tobacco-dependent regions. Tobacco-industry political influence killed thecollaborative momentum, and none of the recommendations have been realized(Benson in press).

There are many obstacles to diversification. Alternative crops require farmers toacquire specialized knowledge and new management skills or to invest in new equip-ment. The majority have lacked the necessary resources (Altman et al. 1996, 1998;Swanson 2001:110–160). Most of the funds from government lawsuits against theindustry that were earmarked to spur diversification went to fund state projectsunrelated to tobacco. There has also been a problem of trust between growers andpublic health groups, just as there is deep distrust and animosity between growersand farm labor advocates (Benson 2010a). Many growers opposed the collabora-tive report because they rightly sensed that the public health goal was to phase outtobacco agriculture. The policy report frankly stated that it sought to have “fewerpeople depend on tobacco production, either directly or indirectly, for their liveli-hoods” (President’s Commission 2001). The collaboration was endorsed by growerswith leadership positions in trade organizations at the time, not necessarily reflect-ing the popular attitude. “Public health groups are condescending and accusatory,”a grower tells me in an interview. “They tell you that they sympathize with yourplight, but then they want to put you out of business. So it was more about themthan us.”

In the international arena, important partnerships have been forged betweenpublic health scientists and tobacco producing communities. The World HealthOrganization (WHO 2008b, 2009) recently insisted that tobacco growers (in theUnited States and abroad) are of considerable political importance to both thetobacco industry and the public health community. The organization endorses poli-cies and programs to promote alternative crops, facilitate livelihood transitions, andmake growers advocates of tobacco control measures. It acknowledges that a holis-tic framework is required to address all aspects of the livelihood of tobacco growers,including economic dependence, existing relations with tobacco companies, the re-lationship between tobacco agriculture and poverty, and community-level healthproblems related to tobacco agriculture, such as pesticide exposure (WHO 2004).The most prominent collaborations so far have been seen in emerging alliances in de-veloping countries, such as collaborations between public health groups and tradeunionists in Malawi to demand tobacco worker rights (Otanez et al. 2007). The


creation of the Human Rights and Tobacco Control Network in 2008 is anotherexample of the integration of global health groups and tobacco-grower and - workerissues (Tobacco Control 2008). The network pulls together disparate advocates andgroups that have been working to improve the rights of farmworkers and growerswhile simultaneously promoting tobacco control.

Anthropology belongs on the list of essential resources in international tobaccocontrol. Public health groups interested in working with tobacco constituencies topromote policy agendas must not discount the local moral perspectives of growersand must engage growers in the context of other powerful influences. As the industryevolves, new sources of strain are emerging in grower relationships to the tobaccoindustry. The flipside of the new regulation of tobacco consumption at the federallevel in the United States has been the liberalization and globalization of tobacco-leafproduction. The New Deal program that long sheltered U.S. growers from marketfluctuations was dismantled in 2004 to reduce leaf prices and increase the compet-itive advantage of domestic leaf on the world market. Tobacco companies pushedfor this policy change by aggressively purchasing leaf in the developing world. Builton neoliberal, free trade ideals, the legislation was intended to reinvigorate the de-clining industry. In fact, it has created a new set of uncertainties and challenges.The traditional auction system was terminated. There is a new system of private,one-year contracts between farmers and multinational cigarette firms. These tempo-rary contracts are now the only way to market tobacco. Prices are tightly ratchetedto efficient and fully mechanized methods; this unevenly benefits larger farms, andthere has been a massive exodus from tobacco farming and increased rural unem-ployment (Griffith 2008). As the contracts, which demand that growers adhere tonew professional and quality control standards, necessitating more grueling manuallabor, do not provide financial compensation for these changes; rather they con-tribute to the race to the bottom in farm wages and working and living conditions.Contracting gets rid of small farms where labor conditions and relations are likelyto be of a higher quality and demands intensive capital investment on the part offarmers, making them more dependent on tobacco capital. As a result, contractingcontributes to social conditions in which division and defensiveness thrive (Benson2008a, 2008b). Growers have a lot at stake in tobacco, all of which hinges onkeeping contracts. It is important to remember that these are not just farmers—theyare tobacco farmers (Griffith 2009). The public morality about tobacco tricklesdown. Growers told me that they feel vilified and demonized for growing tobacco.On family vacations, when people ask them what they do for a living, they lie toavoid confrontation and embarrassment. This combination of predicaments partlymanifests in stigma directed at immigrants and an aging generation of black farm-workers, as I have claimed previously (Benson 2008a), as well as conditions thatmake growers available for political mobilization and, with contracts that nowhinge on obedience, the further entrenchment of company loyalty.

Because the tobacco industry has been involved in decades of misinformation andcontrivance, advocacy efforts need to provide a counterbalance. The defensivenessabout tobacco that is common in North Carolina may be common in other tobacco-producing regions around the world but for different reasons and with a differenthistory of industry influence. Intense loyalties to industry may be present. Criticalreporting on the detrimental impact of tobacco capital in rural communities may


help to destabilize these loyalties. False friendships might become spurs aggravatinggrowers to prefer new and different relationships and more accurate understandingsof why their rural economies have faltered and their farm businesses become lessstable (Thrasher and Jackson 2006). The increased awareness about tobacco anddisease is now taking hold in regions tied to the tobacco industry, as tobacco statesmore and more pass smoke-free legislation. Meanwhile, the avoidance of tobaccoethics in many southern churches may be subsiding as the size of the tobaccogrower population and the number of people financially dependent on tobaccodwindles. It is unclear whether tobacco growers in the United States would now beopen to partnerships with public health groups. The company loyalty demanded incontracting may make this impossible. However, lessons from my case study maybe helpful for other geographical areas. Economic diversification is an importanttobacco control measure because this increases the options that growers and workershave, thereby increasing the price of tobacco leaf and the cost of tobacco products.Attention must also focus on the human rights and environmental health issues thataffect tobacco workers around the world. Helping to organize grower cooperatives,supporting farm labor advocacy and worker unions, promoting the enforcement andexpansion of stringent labor and environmental laws, and improving occupationalsafety and health standards are ways to counterbalance industry power and itsextraction of surplus value from rural regions that it helps keep dependent (Joneset al. 2008; Otanez 2009).

For new partnerships to work it is important that the public health organizationswork with rural communities in sincere ways rather than in terms of a caricatureof narrow-minded, prosmoking adherents. The cultural and moral value of tobaccofor growers must be understood and acknowledged not simply as a means to tailorpublic health programs and strategies, but as a basic human act and the startingpoint of a potentially transformative relationship. What may seem unethical tomany outsiders is completely normal, if not obligatory on a local level. Ricky’sstory suggests that people who exit tobacco can feel like traitors because of real andimagined social pressures. Defensiveness about tobacco may not reflect a lack ofethical reflection or moral conscience. If the ability to live unmarked, the sense ofhaving done nothing wrong, is important to growers because it is part of the widercultural politics of regional and national belonging, then potential collaborativeefforts will be most effective when they do not impart a feeling of blame or guilt.The public health intervention literature suggests that the first step in preventionshould aim to address feelings of stigma and shame linked to specific behaviors orconditions, and I am thinking of the need for a similar kind of contextual sensitivityand social approach in tobacco control. Financial dependence on tobacco revenuesmay often be related to status and a sense of group membership that must beacknowledged as an important reality for grower households. Growers themselvesmight feel diminished or stigmatized because of the public nature of antitobaccomessaging.

The preponderance of harmful behaviors depends only partly on informed adultdecisions, although this is precisely the framing of health behavior advocated by theindustries that make harmful products, their preference being a focus on the familyand consumers rather than market regulations. It also depends on a loose affiliationbetween millionaires and billionaires, a lax government stance with regard to capital


and its rights, shameful government and civil society collusions with industriesthat put producers and consumers at risk, and a general public resignation aboutcapitalism and its products, where just because something is legal or popular, oreven existing, it is legitimate.

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tobacco talk: reflections on corporate power and the legal framing of consumption

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